Google's Pierre Far, their mobile SEO man, announced on Google+ that Google has quietly added support for skip redirect to handle rel-alternate-media annotations.

Pierre calls this a "sweet little update." He explains that using the rel-alternate-media annotiation gives you more flexibility in how you handle users versus robots. He explains:

In this case, even if the desktop page doesn't automatically redirect to the smartphone page, if we discover valid annotations linking the desktop and smartphone pages, our algorithms may still change the link target shown in the search results to point directly to the smartphone page. I know many webmasters asked me about this exact thing, and now you can be happy.

If you have never seen a skip redirect in action at Google, see this story.

Skip Redirect launched in December 2011 and may have kicked off Google's major efforts in mobile SEO topics.